The Law Society of Newfoundland plans to participate in the mobility program, but must wait for the possibility of legislative change. The Quebec Bar may also join at a later date, but it will first have to obtain different authorizations and will likely require separate rules, in recognition of the differences between Quebec`s legal systems and the common law provinces. The National Mobility Agreement and the rules that have been adopted by six Canadian bars are the result of the work of the National Mobility Task Force of the Federation of Legal Societies, which has supported a more liberal mobility system for lawyers. For more information, see the task force report www.flsc.ca/en/pdf/mobility_reportMay2002.pdf. The Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut implemented the Territorial Mobility Agreement only in terms of permanent mobility. There is a national database that allows legal societies to determine whether, in a jurisdiction, a lawyer can sometimes exercise his or her right without authorization. A legal society that wants to determine whether a lawyer is eligible for unleased mobility can access the national database. If you are not eligible for mobility without prior authorization, you must apply for permission to practice law in Ontario on occasion after the code. If permission is granted, the association may impose the conditions it deems appropriate. At present, there is no charge for such an application.
BC lawyers who travel to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to practice and lawyers from those provinces arriving in 2001 could do so without authorization, for up to six months over a 12-month period, under a 2001 « Western Mobility Protocol. » The new national mobility rules in each of these provinces will take over from the Western Mobility Protocol and previous rules on inter-judicial practices. Any lawyer who, under the new mobility rules, wishes to exercise temporarily in another response province can do so without seeking permission, provided that: engineers and geoscientists from British Columbia and the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario (APGO) have signed a mobility agreement that allows the practice in the short term (also called « incident practice ») in one province on the basis of registration or licensing in the other province. The new mobility provisions are defined in Part 2 of the Company Code, which governs both inter-judicial practice, appeal and accreditation. The rules are contained in the Members` Manual amendment package in this mailing and online in the Resource Library/Rules section of the Law Society website under www.lawsociety.bc.ca. Changing realities and the need to remove inter-provincial barriers have led Canadian law firms to recognize jurisdiction since then, wherever they have been admitted to practice.